Four Days On The Danube – Snippet 07

As he got close to the barracks, Tom was relieved to find that his artillery unit was apparently still intact and, nudging from the noise, fighting back with considerable spirit. The unit was officially a company — a “battery,” in the artillery’s parlance — but it was way oversized because the men assigned to Ingolstadt’s defensive guns had been incorporated into it. Instead of two hundred men, Tom had almost four hundred under his command. That was more than a third of the total strength of the Danube Regiment.

Not all of them would have been at the barracks when the fighting broke out. But he probably still had close to three hundred soldiers available in his artillery unit, and he’d picked up a couple of infantry companies on his way to the barracks. The companies belonged to the 2nd Battalion, whose commanding officer had been murdered in his sleep also. The two captains in charge of them had no idea where the rest of the battalion was, nor what had happened to the 1st Battalion.

Tom didn’t know the answer to that question either. But he was pretty sure the 1st Battalion had defected to the Bavarians. That would explain how the enemy had managed to pour into Ingolstadt the way they had. Units from that battalion had been in charge of several of the city’s gates. They would have let in assassination teams first, to target the regiment’s still-loyal officers, and then opened the gates for the Bavarian forces who were camped nearby.

Tom and Colonel Engels had both been worried about the reliability of the soldiers in that battalion, but there hadn’t been much they could do about it given the political situation. Reliable units in the regular army — meaning volunteers, in this context, not mercenaries — were now mostly in Poland or Bohemia. And with a new prime minister, the few such units which were still stationed in the USE itself were not likely to be assigned to the Danube Regiment.

The officers and enlisted men in the 1st Battalion were Italian mercenaries, almost to a man. Italy provided a large percentage of Europe’s professional soldiers. They were valued for their courage and skills — nobody made wisecracks about Italian armies in the seventeenth century — but were notoriously prone to switching sides if presented with the right inducement.

Tom stopped while still just out of sight of the barracks. Behind him, he could hear the sounds of a hundred and fifty men coming to a ragged halt. More ragged than usual. The companies were missing at least a fourth of their men and officers.

The two company commanders came up to join him. “What do you want to do, sir?” asked Captain Conrad Fischer.

Tom had been pondering the problem. With a firefight going on, they couldn’t go directly to the barracks. Even with a moon out, the visibility wasn’t good enough for the men in the barracks to distinguish easily between friend and foe at a distance. In this dim lighting, the field-gray uniforms of the USE regulars would be hard to tell apart from the more nondescript clothing and gear worn by the Bavarians — even leaving aside the problem that, if Tom was right, a fair number of the enemy were USE defectors wearing the same uniform.

If the artillerymen saw a mass of soldiers charging toward them, they’d assume they were enemies and open fire. And that fire would be pretty devastating. By now, forted up in their barracks and the arsenal which directly adjoined it, the regiment’s artillery units would have their cannons in position and loaded with canister. The somewhat desultory gunfire Tom could hear was not the noise produced by a frontal charge. The Bavarians would have tried that once, been driven off, and were now settling down to what amounted to a siege.

It couldn’t last forever, of course. Eventually, they’d bring up their own artillery. But at least until dawn, the Bavarians were stymied.

“Nothing for it,” he muttered.

“What was that, sir?” asked Erhard Geipel, the other captain.

Tom shook his head. “Just talking to myself. We don’t have any choice. We’ll have to attack the enemy from the rear — well, more likely the flank — and drive them off. Until and unless we do that, there’s no way we can join the artillerymen.”

“They’ll just fire on us,” agreed Fischer. “But we may be outnumbered, sir.”

“We almost certainly are,” Tom said grimly. “The Bavarians would have sent at least a battalion to seize the artillery barracks.”

He was using “battalion” in a generic sense, not the precise meaning that the term had in the USE army. Like most armies of the day, the Bavarian forces were composed largely of mercenaries. A good number of them would be Italians, and not more than a third would have come from Bavaria itself. Mercenaries were organized into companies — another generic term — which were of whatever size their commanders could put together, ranking from less than a hundred to close to a thousand.

Tom was convinced that part of the reason many seventeenth century armies liked crude formations like tercios was because the rigidity of the formation compensated to some extent for the irregularities of the units that actually made them up. But in a free-for-all melee like this sort of street fighting after a successful assault on a city, he knew the Bavarian commander, whoever he was, would have simply dispatched one of his larger “companies” to take the artillery barracks.

That meant Tom and his two understrength companies were going to be attacking a force that was at least twice as large as they were.

So be it. They didn’t have any other option, so far as he could see. Hopefully, the much-ballyhooed “advantage of surprise” would turn out to be all it was cracked up to be.

****

Seeing motion in the shadows of the street ahead of them, Rita pressed herself against the wall of a building and gestured with her hand to tell the people following her to stop. She could hear the slight scuffling of their feet but didn’t think anyone else could if they weren’t within ten yards. The motion she’d spotted had been at least twice that far away, just past an intersection.

The men attacking the Barracks may well withdraw pretty easily if hit in flank.

They’re in a strange city, at night, with a known enemy in front of them.

If hit in flank by a force of unknown size then “fall back, regroup, and form up somewhere safer” is an obvious reaction. Again, it’s night, the town isn’t secure, all they’ve got are spy’s reports on enemy forces. They DON’T know they’ve got the flankers outnumbered. If they stay where they are and the new attackers have them outnumbered then they all die as the rest of the attackers surround them and come in from behind once the immediate flankers have located their line.

It’s a hell of a gamble to stay and fight. If I were a junior officer on the flank Tom hits, I’d be pulling out as fast as I could organize the movement. Just make sure you leave them room to retreat and everything should go well enough.

Of course this is a book. “We send our skirmishers forward and they withdraw and call for reinforcements and wait for better light” is deadly dull compared to a knock down drag out fight. So the enemy may not withdraw, but they should want to do so.